At least the Toon Army had something to cheer on Sunday. The ceremonial appearance of Sir Bobby Robson at St James' Park was a poignant reminder of better days for supporters who are so desperate to see good football that they ended the match applauding the captain of the team who had inflicted their latest humiliation.

To see the ailing but unfalteringly courageous Robson taking a seat in the directors' box, on a day designated as a tribute to him, was to be reminded of the failures at board level that have brought Newcastle United to such a sorry condition. At 75 years old he still carries optimism with him like a flag, his presence reminding the fans of how it once felt to roar on a team who could hold up their heads among the Premier League's elite.

Robson, of course, was sacked by the previous administration. In his five seasons in charge the club finished 11th, 14th, fourth, third and fifth in the table. Missing out on Champions League football by one place at the end of 2003-04, combined with two draws and two defeats at the start of the next season and a bit of dressing-room dissent, apparently constituted sufficient grounds for triggering the board's impatience.

Perhaps Robson was nearing the end of the time when he could maintain a genuine bond with his players. But the Newcastle board lacked the imagination to devise a way in which his contribution could be continued in another register, thus preserving the continuity that, in every respect but the fans' ardour, the club has grievously lacked.

This, of course, was the lamentable bunch who later sold the club to Mike Ashley, a London businessman. The new owner constructed a southern-based executive structure so dysfunctional that it eventually cost him the services of Kevin Keegan, the man who, whatever the flaws in his own erratic nature, should still be picking the team.

And now, having failed to find someone to pay £250m to take the club off his hands, Ashley has announced that Newcastle United is no longer for sale. What a Christmas present for the Magpies' supporters, and what a new year to look forward to, with a short-term manager and an owner who dare not show his face at the ground.

Joe Kinnear has done a respectable job since being hauled out of obscurity to take charge at the beginning of October: four wins, six draws and four defeats have secured him a contract extension to the end of the season. He has beaten Aston Villa and come away from Stamford Bridge with a point, the team has been lifted out of the danger area and it is possible to imagine Sunday's hammering at the hands of Liverpool happening to any of his predecessors. Like Robson and Keegan he can call himself a football man, although with nothing like their stature.

Kinnear's next move will be to give Dennis Wise a list of players to target in the January transfer window. Wise, the club's executive director (football), is another senior management figure deterred by public disapproval from attending matches, and it will be up to him to negotiate the release of Ashley's funds for bargain signings. The days when Newcastle could harbour the ambition of beating Manchester United to Wayne Rooney's signature are a distant memory. Now they cannot even be sure of holding on to an ageing Michael Owen.

No club has a divine right to success but Newcastle United are among a group of second-tier clubs - others are Villa, Spurs and Everton - whose health is important to English football. They are the pillars that ensure the integrity of the structure. Every now and then one of them crumbles and is replaced, but never without a feeling of general loss. Ashley may have done just enough, just in time, to stave off disaster but a new owner remains the priority. Whoever it is could do no better than set his compass to the spirit of Bobby Robson.

Mercedes unfit to honour Moss

Stirling Moss drove a vast assortment of fast cars during his wonderful career. Some of the cars were beautiful and some less so but none was as downright ugly as the one just named in his honour. The Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss bears a vague resemblance to the car in which he won the Mille Miglia in 1955, one of his most famous victories, but the overall effect is closer to the aesthetics of the Batmobile. Its looks are as vulgar and egregious as its performance: at this stage in the life of the planet, who needs a road car that can go from nought to 60 in 3.5sec and claims a top speed of 217mph? But no insults from this quarter will damage its commercial prospects. All 75 examples have been pre-sold to owners who have £815,000 to spare. Or who had it to spare before the recession hit. You never know: they may yet be turning up on eBay.

Pinter pause for Scottish verse

With the passing of Harold Pinter, sport lost one of its occasional poets. The Lost Leader, a new collection of verse by Mick Imlah, is threaded with references to Scottish rugby, notably in a lengthy elegy to a late university friend with whom he shared a love of the game as played by men in dark blue shirts: ... Those days, the Scots lost more games than they won, / But the playing parts were mightier than the sum: / The last sparks of the cherub Andy Irvine, / My mother's favourite, "out of Heriot's"; / The hooker, Deans, pent-up, belligerent; / The steep kicks of our fly-half, Rutherford / ("That one's come down with snow on it, I'll tell you"); / Paxton the number eight, who on the box / Was always "thumping on" or "smashing on"; / And Leslie, the deadly flanker from Dundee.

Echoes of the Bill McLaren era there, of course - and, in a poem called London Scottish, a moving evocation of the sportsmen who went off to fight in the War to End All Wars.

Tendulkar beats Hoy for quote of the year

Chris Hoy, after winning everything else available to him, will just have to put up with being edged out of the top spot in this column's quote of the year awards. His classic reply to a journalist who asked "What does Chris Hoy think of Chris Hoy?" - "Chris Hoy thinks that the day Chris Hoy refers to Chris Hoy in the third person is the day that Chris Hoy disappears up his own arse" - is narrowly displaced by Sachin Tendulkar's majestically resonant statement of purpose after his match-winning century against England in Chennai earlier this month, in the shadow of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. "I play for India," the little prince said, "now more than ever."

Armstrong produces the daddy of all comebacks

Lance Armstrong, who had three children with his (now former) wife Kristin by artificial means, using semen stored before his treatment for cancer in the mid-1990s, announced at the weekend that his Australian girlfriend Anna Hansen will give birth in June to their first child, conceived naturally. That's what I call a comeback.